Presently, a caller seeking to establish an audio-only or audio-video call with one or more called parties does so through a series of steps, beginning with initiating the call. After initiating the call, call set-up occurs to establish a connection between the caller and the called party. Assuming the called party chooses to accept the call once set-up, the caller will then announce himself or herself to the called party. The advent of Caller Identification (“Caller ID) allows the called party to engage in “Call Screening,” whereby a called party examines the caller ID (e.g., the telephone number of the called party) to decide whether to answer the call. If the called party has a call answering service, provided by either a stand-alone answering machine or a network service, the called party can forgo answering the call, thereby allowing the call answering machine or answering service to take a message. With many stand-alone answering machines, the called party can listen to the call as the answering machine answers the call. Before the answering machine records a message from the caller, the called party can interrupt the answering machine and accept the call. However, if the called party accepts the call once the answering machine has begun to record the caller's message, the answering machine will now record the conversation between the caller and called party.
Traditionally, a caller initiates a call by entering a sequence of Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) signals representing the telephone number of the called party. The caller will enter the called party's telephone number through a key pad on the caller's communication device (e.g., a telephone) for transmission to a network to which the caller subscribes. Rather than enter a telephone number, the caller could enter another type of identifier, for example, the called party's name, IP address or URL, for example to enable the network to set-up (i.e., route) the call properly.
Many new communications devices, for example mobile telephones, now include voice recognition technology thereby allowing a caller to speak a command (e.g., “call John Smith”) to initiate a call to that party. In response to the voice command, the communications device will first ascertain the telephone number or other associated identifier of the called party (e.g., IP address or URL) and then translate that identification of the called party into signaling information needed to launch the call into the communications network. Presently, the initial voice command made by the caller to launch the call typically never reaches the called party. Instead, the caller's communication device typically will discard the voice command during the process of translating the voice command into the signaling information necessary to initiate the call. At best, the called party will only receive the telephone number identifying the caller. In some instances, outbound calls from various individuals at a common location will have a single number associated with a trunk line carrying the call from that common location into the communications network. Under such circumstances, the called party will only receive the telephone number of the trunk line that carried the call and will not know the identity of the actual caller.
Thus, a need exists for a voice-activated call initiation technique that overcomes the aforementioned disadvantages.